Sapphire today announced its Radeon HD 4730 accelerator. The new GPU surfaced along with Radeon HD 4790. Together these GPUs fill the Radeon HD 4700 series, bringing relief to the demand Radeon HD 4770 created, but is apparently unable to meet due to technical problems with the 40 nm manufacturing node of foundry partner TSMC.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4730 uses a PCB that is pin-compatible with Radeon HD 4870, as it is based on the same RV770 core with a different configuration. The company used a simple cooler with radially-projecting aluminum fins, which it has been using on inexpensive models of the Radeon HD 4850, and HD 4830. The memory is subjected to its air-flow, while the VRM area has a heatsink of its own. The GPU has 640 stream processors enabled, with a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 512 MB of memory. Sapphire cut down on the number of memory chips used, thanks to the narrower memory bus, while maintaining the memory bandwidth of similarly clocked 256-bit GDDR3. The core is clocked at 750 MHz, while the memory is at 900 MHz (3.6 GT/s effective). The outputs provided on the card are DVI-D, D-Sub, and HDMI. The card takes its power input from two 6-pin power connectors. The card uses a 3+2 phase power circuit. The Sapphire HD 4730 is expected to be priced at 80€.

No but its based on the 4870 pcb so the phases should be close to the 4870 standards...
But i am so mad at amd!!!!!!!Whats up with them lately?
All this new 47xx family and these cheap models only not to be able to xfire them with the 48xx family that would have been AWSOME and would have sold thousands of cards...
I mean everyone would buy one more 4830 for their 4850 to pt a decent and cheap power increase on their pc but AMD thought that a new incompatibe lineup like 47xx would be wise before the 5xxx...GREAT IDEA!
Only confuses people with all these different cards...IDIOTS...

ATi have discovered that they get "more free advertising" (on websites) the more SKUs they can release. They will release them one week after the next so that there is always a new Press Release and a thousand website news postings keeping them up in google ranks.

It's a whole new PR/marketing strategy based on google rankings and web-counts.

SUCKS BIG TIME because for US the USER there is nothing new here. Just recycling yesterdays technology.

It has two PCIe 6pin because it is in fact a Radeon 4830/4870 with 160 disabled SP's, and half the memory chips (this is how they made it 128bit GDDR5, from the original 256bit). They are overcomplicating their very good lineup so far with these new strange SKU's. That is a bad thing.

So, is ATI going the same route nVidia was going not so long ago, rebranding old (48xx, 55nm) SKU's as new (47xx, 40nm) ones? At least nVidia's last rebranding wanted to simplify SKU's for the customers. The irony...

To prevent confusion, this is basicly a 4830 card with DDR5 on half the bandwith which equals the DDR3 on original bandwith ( that way they are able to sell the card at this great price ).

This is a stop gap meassure, as the 4770 is in very high demand ( more than ATI expected and is able to produce ) and this card is released for the same price at 80 euros with performance being very close to it.

As far as i know this is a exclusive card for Europe only being sold by Saphire and Powercolor, so I assume this is a temporary offer.

80 Euros is a steal and if you dont care about the powerconsumption differences between this card and the 4770, you might end up with a card that has slightly more OC room.

Though, I guess since this thing can't possibly suck down the power like a 4870 can, I suppose you could just use one of those 2 6-pin splitters for your power supply, and not have to worry about it being underpowered, right?

Though, I guess since this thing can't possibly suck down the power like a 4870 can, I suppose you could just use one of those 2 6-pin splitters for your power supply, and not have to worry about it being underpowered, right?

Since it has the same clock-speeds as HD 4870, you could subtract the power draw of four GDDR5 memory chips (I don't know what that amounts to). This is essentially an HD 4870 with half its memory chips removed (four 1Gb chips sitting on a 128-bit interface).

So it's just slightly better than a 4830, have to see to believe,I have a 4830 running par with most of the upper mid level 4850's and i will be very curious to see how far these can go,so i hope someone here gets one so i can see,if you do please contact me with your bencmarks